In recent years, when a product having a three-dimensional shape is offered for sale on an electronic commerce (EC) site, an auction site, etc., a three-dimensional image is posted as a product image, so that viewers of the site can easily understand the shape of the product. The seller of the product can create a three-dimensional image of the product, for example, by using a projector that projects a predetermined projection image and a camera that captures the image of the product on which the projected image is projected.
An image input apparatus that causes a light projecting module to emit a predetermined light projection pattern on a subject and causes an imaging module to capture a projected image having a distortion of the projected pattern. In this image input apparatus, the relative position between the light projection module and the imaging module is fixed, and the moving module relatively moves the imaging module and accordingly the imaging module captures images of multiple light projection images at different imaging positions is disclosed (see Patent Literature 1).
An object identification apparatus, which captures an image of a bread and a tray while backlight is emitted from the back of the tray carrying the bread, crops the bread area from the captured color digital image, and identifies the type of the bread based on the cropped bread area is disclosed (see Patent Literature 2).